Queen Hit NZ Shores Next Year February with Special Guest Adam Lambert

It's the real life and it's not fantasy. Make way for the much-awaited comeback of phenomenal rock band Queen as they take the Auckland centrestage this February 2018 with special performances from American rock singer-songwriter, Adam Lambert.

Due to the widespread buzz of the tour, an additional Auckland show was added today and tickets will surely fly out the door!

With sold out arena shows on their 2014 Australasian tour, Queen + Adam Lambert’s 2018 tour will be nothing short of amazing. It's been custom tailored for the band by some of the world’s most cutting-edge creative talents. The band will unveil a brand new performance including a specially designed state-of-the-art production. The choice of performance material will no doubt acknowledge this year’s 40th anniversary of Queen’s biggest-selling studio album to date, News of the World from 1977, which yielded the immortal anthems 'We Will Rock You' and 'We Are the Champions'.

Adam Lambert welcomes the challenge of digging deeper into the band’s canon of classics. Since first sharing the stage for the American Idol final in May 2009, Queen + Adam Lambert have proved to be a hugely successful global partnership, having played more than 90 shows in every corner of the world. In summer 2012 they played their first full live shows across Europe, making their spectacular official debut in front of half a million people in Kiev.

He explains, "What people should know if they came to the shows a couple of years back, is obviously we will still be playing the big hit songs you know and love from Queen, but we thought it would be good to challenge ourselves a bit. Change it up a little bit, change the visuals, change all the technology, change the set list to some degree. We will probably be pulling some other songs out of the Queen catalogue which we haven’t done before, which I am very excited about."

When Queen + Adam Lambert played their first North American tour in 2014 they were crowned Band of the Year at the 10th annual Classic Rock Roll of Honor Awards and Best Live Band of the Year in Ultimate Classic Rock’s reader’s poll. This critically acclaimed tour was followed in 2014 with massive summer festivals in South Korea and Japan, and a sold out arena tour of Australia and New Zealand.

2015 proved a logistically challenging year for the band with 24 more sold-out dates in 10 countries right across Europe, a return visit for Queen, this time with Adam, to South America, to headline Brazil’s Rock in Rio, and again perform in Argentina, as well playing Chile. Summer 2016 saw Queen + Adam Lambert headline 15 more European festival shows beginning with Portugal’s Rock in Rio Lisbon, where they played to 74,000 people on opening night, followed by an extensive arena tour across Asia including three nights at Tokyo’s famed Budokan.

Queen drummer and co-founder Roger Taylor insists the 2018 tour “will look entirely different to the show we took around before. Production has really changed a lot, the things you can do now, you have a much broader palette, the technology has really come along."

Guitarist Brian May confirms Queen’s 2018 shows will have a more ambitious musical agenda. He says that the general public knows the hits, so they've got to cater for that but they can chuck in a few things that people really don't expect. They'll do quite a bit more of that this time around. There are so many dimensions to Adam, which of course fits with their music. He can get down and do the rock stuff really dirty, and they have all those dimensions, and they can explore that even more.

"Queen + Adam Lambert’s sold out tour of 2014 was one of the highlights of my career as a concert promoter, to see those iconic songs come to life was incredible. I am very much looking forward to bringing the band back to New Zealand and Australia in 2018 with this brand new show." - Paul Dainty, President and CEO of TEG-Dainty

Who would want to miss this once in a lifetime chance to witness Queen perform live again?